Selling to Geeks

In this chapter of the Geek Leaders Handbook, we are discussing selling to geeks, and that when trying to sell to geeks they are the most difficult people to try and sell too. The book describes non geeks selling to geeks as a challenge because geeks tend to be overly cautious, nit-picky, and paralyzed by analysis. They don’t laugh at jokes or talk about personal things. I agree with that because based on my experience at the apple store, there was a worker there who just had to be a die hard geek. He was so focused on trying to figure out the problem I was having with my device, he never focused on anything else I was saying, usually with workers from other stores they would try to make small talk, but this worker did not.

When trying to work with and sell to a geek, emotions come into effect and there are a few things that people should understand, first you should know how geeks think, how they make decisions, what excites them, what offends them and last what moves them to act. Once you know all of these things, you have kind of built a relationship with the geek. Once you know what moves them to act, you can move them into making a buying decision. Just like everyone else, when trying to sell to someone, make sure you’re working hard enough to convince someone to buy what you have, naming all the important features and how this can benefit me in the future. Something like that would definitely convince me into making a buying decision. Emotions come into effect with this situation because when making de

cisions they are emotional acts, they are “essential for decision making”. When thinking about buying something you have to think about whether or not buying the object is going to benefit you in any way, it is a tough decision making process because you just don’t want to waste money on anything and everything. As the book says once you analyzed something that you want to buy then you will feel comfortable that the decision that you made is reasonable and you didn’t waste money on the object that you bought. The quote “reason makes people think, and emotions make people act” is not a true statement for geeks due to the fact that reasons make geeks thinks and emotions make them suspicious. That is a weird statement for me because I don’t get suspicious when it comes to my emotions, geeks feel as if people are trying to distract them from something.

When selling to geeks you need to focus on benefits. When you focus on benefits you will be able to motivate people to buy and get things, you don’t want to annoy people with your sales, they don’t want to hear a bunch of stuff about the product that they don’t need to know about. You can make your benefits believable by crafting a clear problem statement, demonstrating how the benefits of what you’re selling will resolve the problem and last showing off the features of how your offer delivers the benefits. When doing each of these things you have made a geek customer happy, they will be happy to work with you and purchase from you.

In conclusion even though geeks maybe the most difficult to work with, there are many ways that you can build a relationship with them such as understanding how to make them move to act, into making buying decisions. You have to access emotions through reason. Break down ideas so that they can understand what is going on. Last the book talks about geeks showing excitement. They express their emotions differently then other people. When trying to sell to a geek and you succeed, they are going to show excitement, but you probably can’t tell. So don’t look for huge smiles or anything that an average person might do when they are happy.